The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many companies have a desire to provide remote access to their private computer intranets. By permitting remote access, users can connect to the company's computer intranet to work and obtain resource information while located at a remote site. A drawback associated with providing remote access to a company's private computer intranet is that unauthorized users may sometimes gain access to the network system, thus potentially allowing the company's resources and information to be accessed, used or compromised.
One approach to prevent unauthorized access to a company's private intranet is to limit access to only specific “trusted” network devices. For example, an address allocator located in customer premises equipment (CPE) may control the allocation of Internet protocol (IP) addresses to network devices such that “trusted” network devices are assigned an address from a “trusted” pool of network addresses, while “untrusted” network devices are assigned addresses from an “untrusted” pool of network addresses. In order to determine whether a network device should be allocated an address from the trusted pool, the client ID, which uniquely identifies the network device, may be authenticated locally in the CPE by comparing the client ID to a statically configured list of trusted client ID's.
A drawback to the above approach is that the trusted client ID list is statically configured, and therefore any change to this list requires a configuration change on the local CPE. Further, this approach does not prevent a network device with a static IP address in the secure address range from accessing the private company intranet.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for a method for assigning network addresses to network devices in which authentication of a client ID is performed by an external, centrally located entity, which is easily configured by a central administrator.